The federal government declassified more than 193 million pages of
historical documents in fiscal 1998, bringing the total to 593 million
since President Clinton ordered automatic declassification of most
historic documents in 1995, according to a report this week by the
National Archives' Information Security Oversight Office (ISOO).

The ISOO, established in 1978 to oversee the government's security
classification system, called the automatic declassification of historic
documents after 25 years "a radical departure from the secrecy
policies of the past."

But Steven Aftergood, director of the Federation of American
Scientists' Project on Government Secrecy, said the program has
been damaged by Congress and believes far fewer documents have
been declassified in fiscal 1999, which ended Sept. 30.

Aftergood said Congress crippled the program a year ago when it
added a provision to the fiscal 1999 defense authorization bill
requiring that agencies engage in page-by-page declassification to
ensure that historic records did not contain nuclear weapons secrets.

If that were not enough, Aftergood said, Congress has added
provisions in the fiscal 2000 defense authorization bill, which Clinton
signed Tuesday, requiring page-by-page review of all 593 million
documents already declassified and limiting the amount of money the
Pentagon can spend on declassification to $51 million.

The ISOO report does not refer to these new legal provisions but
noted that Congress's initial requirement for page-by-page review "is
likely to impede the ability of executive branch agencies to meet
interim targets and may diminish the numbers of older historically
valuable documents declassified in the coming years."

Nonetheless, Steven Garfinkel, the ISOO's director, said Aftergood
overstates the impact of the new congressional provisions. Most
departments already were doing page-by-page reviews before
Congress acted, he said, and $51 million should be enough to fund
the Pentagon's most important declassification initiatives.

The CIA, meanwhile, revealed that it had declassified 3 million pages
of documents in fiscal 1999, 2 million more than the period covered in
the ISOO report, sending 2,000 boxes in three tractor-trailer trucks to
the National Archives in College Park. The information included
original negatives from the agency's collection of worldwide ground
photography, early Directorate of Operations intelligence reports and
intelligence records from the Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson
presidential libraries.